Arguing 101

She's pretty and pregnant, petite and puttering around her new home, nesting you could say, "They have that new law trying to be put through, you know, the marriage defense thing. Where they say that marriage has to be between a man and a woman only."

"I have no problem with them calling marriage any way they want, but it's only fair to make sure gay people get the same benefits and legal status as married people. They can call it whatever they want."

The husband speaks, "Well, it isn't like they're discriminating against Black people or anything, it's a lifestyle choice."

"I don't know, man, it seems like most of the gay people I know would never have been anything else."

"Maybe", he says as he sits down across from me with his Memorial Day barbecue, a glowing new father, alive with the joys of family, "but I mean, it's natural for me to molest kids, too."

Something went wrong with this conversation somewhere. That's a pretty invalid simile.

I say: "My biggest problem with it is government over-jurisdiction."

"Meaning?"

"Well, you obviously love your wife and you guys have a pretty good life going..", he nods and reaches out an arm to hug her around her bulging, pregnant hips, "...do you think you're truly married?"

"Absolutely."

"Then do you really want the Government defining to you what your marriage is?"

"As long as it's a moral definition. That's the whole purpose of Democracy."

"What if you weren't in the majority? I mean, do you want it just being a consensus of more than 51% that defines what everything is to you? I personally would rather the Government stay out my shit and not overstep its bounds."

At my profanity, hardly noticeable elsewhere, the little wife went pale and began chopping at the greasy dishes with a disassociated ferocity.

"See, that's why you have to elect moral lawmakers."

"But who's morals? I mean, you have to respect that not everyone agrees with you. If you expected to be in the majority in this situation, wouldn't you have to consider how others would like to be treated?"

Surely, quoting the central figure to his belief would make rationality reign.

"No, not as long as you're making a morally sound law."

"Do you want the Government defining morals? That scares me."

"Well, you have to make sound moral, Biblical laws for God to keep blessing your country. If you don't, he'll punish you, and your country will suffer. It's only because America is still so strong and faithful to God, like we've always been that we're where we are now."

"There's no way I can argue with that line of reasoning."

He smiles kindly, "See, it all makes sense when you get back to the basics."

The Late-Afternoon of my Discontent

Rowboat, won't you row be back to shore? She don't want to be my friend no more. I had a decent writing project come to me recently. Not really a project, more of a damn book. I won't ever go anywhere, but it seems like a good idea. Of course, I have a lot of good ideas for books, what I lack is the discipline to maintain an emotional state for more than about six hours.

The idea of the book occurred to me while I was writing a letter I'm not going to send. I had a friend decide not to be my friend anymore. Honestly, I don't blame her. Sure, it frustrated me, but I think women continuing to talk to me is probably evidence of a severe breach in their judgment.

I wrote her a flowing letter thanking her for what she was and is, and then I told her why she was better off. She's not the only girl who deserves one of those letters.

There are four women who deserve letters. As of the inception of this idea, only one still talks to me. The letters would be my last will and testament to them before I die completely in their universe. A nice little epitaph to whatever we may have been to each other. The book would aptly be titled "Four Letters." It would have a maroon cover and be on Oprah's reading list. When I would go to Borders, there it would sit on the shelves I always walk by on my way to the real literature, hidden from the pop-reading browsers by being placed without display onto the racks.

I would go on Oprah and look terrifyingly handsome in a gray suit with a blue shirt, open collar. I would not have the ragged unkemptness of the other authors. Vital and in shape, in stark contrast to everyone's preconception of the Author of so fine a book being old and stuffy. I would draw female fans into my clutches and amass an army of semi-literate groupies. They would make a movie out of my book starring Caroline Ducey, Keira Knightly, Alexis Bledel, and Scarlett Johansson. I would start lecturing on campuses. I have no idea who would play me in the movie.

Eventually, I would tire of the droll repetition of lithe, young college girls and clandestine thirty-somethings, just as I tire of writing a string of earth sciences based best selling novels. I would meet the raven-haired love of my life in Rico, Colorado gassing up my 1965 International Scout. We would settle on a huge ranch in the San Juans where I would take up wood carving and raise between two and four boys in the way they should go, so that when they are old, they should not depart from it.

As I get old, I will take up sailing and sweep my now silver-haired bride around the world. We will have a full selection of wine aboard with which to entertain foreign celebrities and sound engineers. 20/20 will interview me on the deck of my yacht while I am moored in Turkey. I will be humble and gracious. Honest and open. The reporter would call me the "John Steinbeck of Geology."

Somewhere in the back of my mind, four women would live. Memorialized in letters.

PreterNothing

I have lived life in and out of the grasp of angels and demons for as long as I can remember. For we don't wrestle with flesh and blood, but with the principalities of and powers of the air.

I have seen demons. Not in some writer's license sort of way, but in the world of doors and windows and puppy dogs and station wagons. Demons of all sizes. Some floating in the sky over an evil valley where I was told they would be, sometimes in a half dream building a coffin around me as a lay paralyzed. They used to hang around, shadows of another world blocking the light of reason and intellectual accountability.

I haven't seen them much since I learned what they were. They exist, alright. In fact they are as real and as false as anything on this Earth. They live in your head and reek havoc from between the tissues of conscious and unconscious states. They sit on your chest and constrict your throat in completely explainable physiological ways.

I saw one the other night, as I lay dying to another day. I was at a point near exhaustion when my body hit the bed and my mind let me drift off. I was still in my very real room, lying on my very real bed, staring up at my very real ceiling. When we are awake enough for our nimble mind to jump immediately into darkness, it is impossible to see what hides in the shadows. I was so tired that my sluggish mind tripped along the road to sleep and fell into the brambles of psychotic dreamscape. I recognized the state. I have been there many times through meditation. In this stage right of reality, I have traveled the continents in single bounds and flown up to the moon. I have sank into the folds of the Earth and breathed in the cool soil under miles of sea, basking in the freedom of a playful mind.

This time, there was no sense of freedom. I drifted like a foundering boat into a morbid, decaying night. I felt my limbs go dead as wood, a feeling that I usually find preternaturally calming. This time, I felt them die. My jaw was locked shut. My neck had only the slightest movement with the utmost effort. Dread calm descended on the room like a lead curtain. The insects were silenced and the fear rose in my dammed up throat. The darkened air pulled away from me and sucked into a vortex near my east-facing window. I have lived through this before, only without cerebral knowledge of what was beginning to form. I knew any minute, I would have a Visitor.

The air thickened into a palpable clenched fist under my window. The room wavered in the waves of passing time. The chaos of spinning and fear escalated into a dull roar. Horizon and verizon fell off of their relative homes. The chaos crescendo in the blinding movements of everything around me and deafening noise of thought-words flew through my head and out into the void of my very real room.

I could have stopped it all. As any practicioner of the arts of altered states knows, there has to be a magic button. For me it is blinking. I can stop any spiraling experience in my lucid dreams or semi-conscious rambling by blinking. I have used it several times to stop a frightening fall.

I didn't want to stop this. I wanted to let all that was building up happen. Let the demons come. I knew their substance, there was nothing to fear. What valuable insights into my own psyche could be gained by allowing my eyes to see what my brain was desperately trying to avoid? It would be a shame, I convinced my shaking self, to let this rare experience go to waste. Who would I see? Any rational person could stick this out. The gravity of my room left me and pooled in the gathering ominous nothing in front of my window. Any rational person would want to experiment with this occurrence.

Right?

They have won...

I recieved a booklet at work today. It is supposed to help me reach my potential as a member of that particular team.

I wonder what it is about corperate employers that make them want you to feel twelve years old. I have worked construction trades before, as well as a slew of other manly jobs where my boss lives in the same town as me. Never once did I feel like I was a middle school student instead of an employee. I am perfectly capable of understanding philosophies, mysteries, and some religions. I believe I can understand how a warehouse/package store stays in business. I don't need remedial grown-up classes.

The title of the book?

How To Be Orange Everyday

That really is the title to a booklet I'm supposed to carry around in my big, orange apron. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Or drink. Drinking sounds nice. Too bad I have to be rolling into work at 9:30 p.m.

And I do hate drinking a six in the morning. On the other hand, what goes better with my huevos rancheros for dinner than a good stout?

Black

Standing in the empty, unfurnished living room of some low-income apartments in Virginia Beach. My shirt sticks to me, we can't afford A/C. I don't notice except for the heat and smell of another body, skinny and blonde, warm and sweating in front of me.

Not a terrible memory.

I was browsing the boxed wine offerings of the local liquor barn in Grand Junction. They all looked cheap and gratingly sweet. These wines are really only good for a sangria, sacrament, or for medical purposes. My mother has become convinced that two glasses of red wine, any cheap, disgusting cough syrup red wine, will help her maintain her health.

I don't debate that wine may indeed be healthy, though the two bottles of my former life consumed a night is probably counterproductive.

The piped in music caught my subconscious ear. Guitar, some sort of effect, jangly-soft notes of an undefined chord. A bass line cut through. I knew this song. I was born in 1980, of course I knew this song. Sheets of empty canvas, something about sheets of clay.

The song is not great. In fact, I really don't like Pearl Jam that much. I didn't like much grunge. I probably should have when I was a kid, but it just seemed contrived. I hated the crazy-haired androgeny of '80s rock even more. I guess I became a Nirvana fan by default.

Woah, I'm spinning...

Eddie sure can't enunciate. "Turn my world to black, tattoo all I see tattoo wurly-uuunh...Why?" I don't know, Ed. Why did you have such potential to be more than a Neil Young cover band and never use it? As I said, Pearl Jam is not my favorite band.

Had my brain been functioning, I would have thought of all this. I do like this particular offering, "Black". Mindlessly, I mouthed the words to myself and formed a hazy memory. A girl in black. She's very beautifully broken. Still.

The shop hand walked by me, mindlessly mouthing the words. We caught each other. We shared self-conscious smiles and nodded. Yep, we're children of our times. I went back to my wine and my memories.

Her hands are sweeping over me in time to the song, piped through cheap PC speakers. The room is spinning. I force her closer to me and kiss her more deeply, tasting Camel Turkish Gold and Jim Beam. She goes a little weak, just like she always does. I'm home again.

Not a terrible song, really. Not a bad memory, either. In fact, tonight, sitting here with a good glass of cranberry juice, the Jim Beam of this stage in my life, I have to admit they're both pretty damn good. Dark, like a good cabernet a little sweet, but not enough to make you forget the toil and pain associated with production. I like the song, and I like the memory of her. Both sanguine and nihilistic, self-absorbed. Pleasant like a good funeral.

They're both just a little sad.

ΔFat¹MAGIC

I have a physics final tomorrow. I can't think of any better way to prepare for it than a long day of riding my ass off. I think I have a little more ass to ride off, what with the injuries I got last time I went out keeping me off my bike. That and all the horribly unhealthy food I've been eating.

It doesn't take long for me to notice softness creeping in. I have been lazy, and now my bike and I have to pay the price. How many donuts does it take to get through finals? Surely less than I ate. I hate donuts, or any confection for that matter. Why was I on a strudel and muffin spree for a straight week? Well, Fatty McBeerbuckle has no answer, save pedalling. Gluttony is a sin as terrible as lust, anyway. So, no more women, treats or booze for me. At least until I can breathe like something besides a fat kid.

So, if you see a panting fatty blocking your way up Mary's Loop today, don't be angry. That's just me and a couple too many beers trying to slog our way into some fun.

I just hope that my bike made out better from that last wreck than I did. I can't afford any more repairs.

Oops.

So, I meant to make some small changes to my little corner here and deleted the whole thing on accident. Luckily, my computer still had a visit from a couple days ago in the history folder. I think I lost two posts, but they were just warm up writing for a paper, anyway. I think I used "deletable" in the title to one of them. So, there you are. I'm an idiot.

Zen and the Art of Holy Cross Trail

You know what they ain't doing?

They ain't a kiddin', boys. They ain't a kiddin'.

You ought to see the rest of me. Shit.

You know, a man needs a handlebar that he can lean on, but my leanin' post has done left and gone. When you hear a creaking in your headset, make sure you take that seriously. It won't let you down under normal circumstances, but it sure will fail when you're making a high angle drop down into a nice little arroyo. Then you got to pay the price. Oh lord.

That damn bar started giving, plunging forward from the stresses of the four foot drop I shouldn't have been making on an under-equipped bike. Then it went all the way over and I had no type of control. I rolled three times and I only come up twice. Luckily my face didn't take the hit. The rest of me feels a little worse for wear. I lost some blood here and there. It's amazing how much of our civilized lives keep wearing on with no real pain or loss. We whine about our jobs and our loves. We whine about all the gas price bullshit we're spoon-fed by the media. We whine about our house's depreciation. We whine about being alone.

Then you stand by a trail out in the desert, alone, with blood pouring down your battered limbs staring down into a valley of rush hours and melodramas. The impermenance of all things flows through and around you, watching your blood fall in the red sand and forming clots in the fine dust of ages gone past. The sand here is red, dyed by hematite, a type of iron, oxidizing in the dry air, and my blood is bright red, hemoglobin, the same type of iron oxidizing and oxidated, dyeing my skin red. The building blocks of aerobic respirating organisms paying homage to the glowing core of the earth from which we all explode and then seep back into without a whimper.

It doesn't hurt. Someday, my blood will be returning to the soil of the Earth, red and beautiful, my life, as a vapor, quickly fading away. The blood of my father and his father's father's father before him, it's all going to flow into the river of time out of my own vascularity, maybe with my own heirs carrying this little piece of terra with them, flowing in their veins. When my progeny make their way to a new planet or a new star, they'll bleed the same iron that colors Colorado red. Adam is under my feet, dusting my shirt and face and tires. My blood is falling into the face of creation. Into the flowing glyph of this short existence of flowing, flashing light into the oblivion of void.

I can think of worse places to bleed.

Godspeed You Black Emporer, Moya